As is mentioned on the main PHP.net site, the release of the first beta of the PHP 5.6.0 series has been released (PHP 5.6.0beta1). This is only a preview release and should not be used in production.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.0beta1. This release adds new features and fixes bugs and marks the feature freeze for the PHP 5.6.0 release. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

Among the new features coming in PHP 5.6.0 are things like the addition of a fread method on the SplFileObject, an update to the DateTimeImmutable class, support for marks to the PCRE extension and support for asynchronous connections and queries to the Pgsql extension. If you'd like to test out this latest beta release on your systems, you can download it from the PHP QA site (or the Windows QA site if you're so inclined).